VIZBI 2011

I've spent the last three days at VIZBI, a Workshop on Visualizing Biological Data, held at the Broad Institute in Boston (note that "Broad" rhymes with "Code"). A great conference in a special venue that includes the DNAtrium. Videos of the talks will be online "real soon now", look for the keynotes, which were full of great ideas and visualisations. To get a flavour of the meeting search for the hashtag #vizbi on Twitter (you can also see the tweet stream on the VIZBI home page). All the keynotes were great, but I personally found Tamara Munzer's the most enlightening. She drew on lots of research in visual perception to outline what works and what doesn't when presenting information visually. You can grab a PDF of her presentation here.

One aspect of the meeting which worked really well was the poster presentations. Poster sessions were held during coffee breaks, and after the last talk of the session but before the audience broke for coffee, each author of a poster got 90 seconds to introduce their poster (there were typically around 10 posters per break). This meant the poster authors got a chance to introduce themselves and their work to the workshop audience, and the audience could discover what posters were being displayed. Neat idea.

I gave a presentation on phylogenies, which I've put on slideshare. After explaining that I thought phylogeny visualisation was mostly a solved problem (as evidenced by the large number of tree viewers available), I continued the theme of why I don't think 3D works for phylogeny (except for geophylogenies), made the pitch for building a phylogeny viewer on the iPad, and finished with my recent work on Google Maps-style viewing very large trees.

Phylogeny VIZBI 2011

View more presentations from Roderic Page

Geography and genes: zoomable view of frog NCBI classification with linked map

More zoom viewer experiments (see previous post), this time with a linked map that updates as you browse the tree (SVG-capable browser required). As you browse the frog classification the map updates to show the location of georeferenced sequences in GenBank from the taxa in the part of the tree you are looking at. The map is limited to not more than 200 localities, and many frog sequences aren't georeferenced, but it's a fun way to combine classification and geography. You can try it at:

http://iphylo.org/~rpage/deeptree/7.html

or watch the video:

Zoomable tree with linked map from Roderic Page on Vimeo.

The Mendeley API Binary Battle - win $US 10,001

Now we'll bring the awesome. Mendeley have announced The Mendeley API Binary Battle, with a first prize of $US 10,0001, and some very high-profile judges (Juan Enriquez, Tim O'Reilly, James Powell, Werner Vogels, and John Wilbanks). Deadline for submission is August 31st 2011, with the results announced in October.

The criterion for judging are:

1. How active is your application? We’ll look at your API key usage.


2. How viral is the app? We’ll look at the number of sign ups on Mendeley and/or your application, and we’ll also have an eye on Twitter.


3. Does the application increase collaboration and/or transparency? We’ll look at how much your application contributes to making science more open.


4. How cool is your app? Does it make our jaws drop? Is it the most fun that you can have with your pants on? Is it making use of Facebook, Twitter, etc.?


5. The Binary Battle is open to apps built previous to this announcement.

Start your engines...